Author's Note: I was stationed in Hawaii from 1976 to 1979 and I visited the Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor during April 1998. I also was in military intelligence and I conducted amateur research on America's disaster at Pearl Harbor. During my last visit, I developed a list of ten things America got right during December 1941 on Oahu. 1: No Japanese invasion of Oahu was attempted in 1941 (even though Yamamoto strongly urged landing troops there) because the shore batteries and anti-landing measures were too strong for the Imperial Japanese Navy to overcome. 2: No Japanese Fifth Column formed on the Hawaiian Islands. 3: No Japanese sabotage of American aircraft occurred on Oahu during World War Two. 4: No American ship was sunk by the two dozen Japanese fleet submarines ringing the Hawaiian Islands. 5: In contrast to item number 4 above, the United States Navy sank one IJN fleet boat and at least two midget submarines. 6: The decision to dispatch aircraft carriers sans battleship support was correct -- the aircraft carriers were used to rush reinforcing aircraft to Wake and Midway Islands. The carriers could cruise 10 knots faster without the battleships, and because the United States was on war alert, the 50% increase in speed returned the aircraft carriers to the fleet in roughly 65% of the time that the carriers would have been absent had they deployed with battleships. Speed in reinforcing Wake Island repulsed one Japanese amphibious operation. 7: The radar station on Oahu was properly sited, given the limited duty time available (due to the experimental nature of radar at the time) was turned on at the right time, pointed in the right direction, and netted into a functioning centralized command and control system (admittedly , the junior officer on duty misread the data provided by the radar, but the radar did spot the attack and report it in time for an interception if the alarm had been given). 8: The American signals intelligence effort compromised by Yardley's book "The Black Chamber" caused the Japanese to take extraordinary measures to deceive American radio listening posts: fake radio traffic from Tokyo Bay and a total radio blackout of the strike force en route crated much difficulty for the Japanese. 9: Immediate anti-aircraft response (including the undiscovered airfield at the north end of Oahu) not only led to 29 Japanese aircraft lost (mostly torpedo bombers coming in low over Pearl Harbor) but also convinced the IJN task force commander to cut and run rather than lose aircraft and ships Japan couldn't replace. 10: Most of all, the decision to anchor the fleet in Pearl Harbor was the right one: better protection from submarine, surface vessle, and aircraft attack. The fleet anchorage was out of range of land-based fighter aircraft, and Pearl Harbor was also under an U.S. Army anti-aircraft artillery umbrella. Furthermore, the IJN was forced to develop special equipment and techniques to deal with torpedo bombing ships in the shallow, narrow bay, protected by high volcanic mountain ranges on three sides -- and developed special ship-killing bombs because the standard 250-kg armor-piercing bomb used by the "Val" dive bomber was too light to sink America's obselete battleships. Five of eight battleships sunk at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, took part in a surface action against two Japanese battleships in 1945 and sank both IJN battleships without losing an Allied ship. Pearl Harbor was a hard-won victory for the Japanese. However it really isn't necessary to scapegoat ourselves for "failure." In some cases correct decisions mitigated the disaster and many things operated precisely as they were supposed to. Back to Cry Havoc #33 Table of Contents Back to Cry Havoc List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2001 by David W. Tschanz. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com